


Seven Times then Six Again

by JoAsakura



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Witchcraft, M/M, slasher 76 x witch/vampire reaper
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-04 01:28:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21189281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoAsakura/pseuds/JoAsakura
Summary: For @marshyblob 's incredible evocative Witch Gabe pic on teh twitterz. Thanks for letting me do this!





	Seven Times then Six Again

**1**

It was far too early for any gentleman to be strolling the gallows way, and for scavengers who haunted this grim place, the day was nearly over.

The man in his fine black hat and his fine black coat certainly didn’t seem to belong, but that had never stopped him before.

An appropriately liminal time in an appropriately liminal space, Gabriel thought as he counted his way along the gibbets, numbers burned into their sturdy wooden posts. Lord Petras had not lost his taste for upholding some of his most cherished civic traditions, if the number of bodies caged in iron and rot was any indication.

Overhead, seagulls and ravens vied for supremacy and the air was fetid with the scent of rotting fish and rotting flesh alike.

Gabriel Reyes had no regrets over leaving this place.

(75.. 76…)

He stared at the body dangling before him, pallid and ashen except for the smears of mud-dark dried blood, manacles still binding broken wrists.

Gabriel Reyes had one regret over leaving this place.

“Oh, Jack,” he said softly, tilting up his hat and squinting red eyes up at corpse in its cage of iron. “Time has not been kind to you.”

Mad Jack Morrison. Jack had gone off to war for King and Country with a merry light in his blue eyes and hair like the sun. The horrors he had endured had stolen the sun from his smile and left him with a gaze like ice and hair as bleached as bone when he returned years later.

The charms Gabriel had cast before Jack marched off might have saved his life, if the scars on his face were any indicator, but they hadn’t kept his heart from breaking. Hadn’t kept him from breaking under the weight of it until he’d pushed Gabriel away entirely, and Gabriel had let him.

Gabriel leaned on his walking stick, an ivory mask carved into the knob beneath his hands, and he breathed out the rhyme the local children skipped to.

_Mad Jack_   
_ Lives in a shack_   
_ Cuts down the naughty_   
_ Whackity-Whack_

_One penny silver_   
_ One penny gold_   
_ A crown in the middle_   
_ Summons him cold_

_Mad Jack_   
_ Fear he does lack_   
_ Creeps up through the woods_   
_ A skull he does crack_

_The rich lady here_   
_ The wealthy man there_   
_ A fat priest in the middle_   
_ He slays without care_

_Mad Jack_   
_ Puts his axe on the rack_   
_ You’d best say your prayers_   
_ He might hurry back_

One of the ravens above landed on the gibbet and gave Gabriel a questioning look.

“Don’t eat him, he’s mine,” he said with a scowl, and the bird made an aggrieved noise before joining the overhead fray again.

**2**

The rhyme called it a shack, but it was hardly that. The grand stone walls spoke to a time of grandeur, and as Gabriel carried the corpse of Mad Jack Morrison through the halls, he could almost hear the laughter and music, the smell of perfume and food.

It was not a shack, but it was a ruin, like the man who’d haunted these faded, waterlogged corridors.

A few curious ravens had followed them in, and he looked pointedly at one as he set Jack down on the once-beautiful dining table. “We had our last fight, right there in that corner. He believed he could create a world where war would never be fought again if he could just rid us of all the greedy and the selfish. I had another way. But war took his patience, and we parted in anger.”

Seven times, with water carried from the stream, Gabriel gently washed the body.

“I came as soon as the wind carried the news to me, Jackie,” he said softly, pushing back his own iron-black curls. “If you’d killed Lord Petras’ wife, you’d have been so much more efficient at it. Framed and hung and I bet you spat in his face from the hangman’s noose.”  
Seven times, with seven burning herbs, Gabriel passed the smoke over the body.

“It’s lucky for me they didn’t lock you in the seventy-seventh gibbet. That number is a journey twice over and the window would be lost,” Gabriel laid his silver and ruby rings around the body.

Seven times, with seven twigs of hazel, Gabriel touched the seven points of the body.

“I should have been here for you, and I wasn’t, my love. And this city groans under the weight of Petras’ taxes and lies. I’m here now, to make it up to you, to make it right.”

Seven times, Gabriel drove spikes of seven holy metals into the ruined, ash-white skin.

“I love you, Jackie. And I will drag you back from whatever hell Petras and his lies sent you to.”

Gabriel Reyes knew that darkness could be be a cloak for evil, but also a shadow in which light could rest and be reborn in the dawn. And with ancient magic and ancient tongue, he called out to seven gods and seven devils. With a silver knife, he pricked his hand seven times and spread his witch-born blood onto Jack’s dead body.

Six times, Gabriel kissed breath against Jack’s dead lips. The seventh, those lips parted, and once-blue eyes opened with the orange flame of the Next World.

Jack’s lips moved silently, and Gabriel pressed his manicured fingers to them. “The journey back from the land of the dead takes a heavy toll, love. Seven times, then six again, we send Petras and his people back to hell in your place, so the devil won’t be lonely.” He handed Jack a mask made from the bones of seven dead men.

Just once, Mad Jack Morrison smiled, and covered his face.


End file.
